Slime not connecting to swank socket

[Helmut Eller]

On Sun, Sep 15 2013, Dana Wheeler wrote:

> When starting slime with "M-x slime" a window is created and displays the
> *inferior-lisp* process with the message:
>
> (progn (load "/Users/Dana/slime/swank-loader.lisp" :verbose t) (funcall
> (read-from-string "swank-loader:init")) (funcall (read-from-string
> "swank:start-server") "/var/folders/gq/3hr2_3j961d6rsz4dm8x83ch0000gq/T/
> slime.2310"))
>
> and polls ... forever.

The *inferior-lisp* buffer should contain some more output, typically it
shows what files are compiled/loaded and also error messages.  If things
go well it should have something like ";; Swank started at port: 43643."
at the end.

>
> Enmap 127.0.0.1
>
> shows
>
> 4005/tcp  open  pxc-pin
>
> so swank appears to be working and has opened the proper port but
>
> ls /var/folders/gq/<gobbldee-goop>/T
>
> shows no file "slime.2310". I am assuming that slime made a request to the
> system for a virtual file interface to the port 127.0.0.1:4005 and that
> request failed either on the slime end or the system end. Setting

It seems to me that some other Swank server is listening on 4005,
because the port used with "M-x slime" is usually not 4005, but some
random number. 4005 is used when Swank is started with
swank:create-server as opposed to swank:start-server.  Perhaps you
called swank:create-server in some other way and forgot about it.  You
can try "M-x slime-connect 127.0.0.1 RET 4005 RET" to see if that other
server is actually working,

As can be seen in the *inferior-lisp* buffer, swank:start-server was
used there.  swank:create-server should create the file
(/var/.../slime.2310) and that file contains the port number to which
Emacs will then connect.  As long as that file doesn't exist, Emacs will
just wait for that file to appear.

>
> M-x toggle-debug-on-error
>
> produces no information as apparently emacs hasn't detected an error.
>
> The slime portion of my configuration is
>
> ;; ***************************  Activate SLIME for Clozure 
> *******************************
> (add-to-list 'load-path "/Users/Dana/slime/")  ; your SLIME directory
> (setq inferior-lisp-program "/Applications/ClozureCL.app/Contents/MacOS/
> dx86cl64 -K utf-8")
> (require 'slime)
> (slime-setup)

Your configuration looks OK.

> Any suggestions on how to debug this would be greatly appreciated.

As I said above, the *inferior-lisp* buffer should contain some more
output that explains what is going on and that's the best place to
start.

Helmut